A first-rate, riveting chronicle of a real-life industrial conflict and tragedy.
Selleck and Thompson recount a 1990s Canadian labor dispute that precipitated violence, sabotage, and the startling deaths of nine gold miners in this nonfiction work.
The trouble started when Royal Oak Mines took control of various gold mines in Canada. One of those was called Giant, located in the mining town of Yellowknife, where Royal Oak CEO Margaret “Peggy” Witte implemented “vigilant supervision” over the employees. This didn’t sit well with Giant’s union, the Canadian Association of Smelter and Allied Workers, especially as Royal Oak essentially dismissed the union’s grievances that had piled up during the mine’s ownership transfer. When the collective agreement expired in March 1992, a strike was inevitable. Negotiations only led to bad blood between the company and the union, and Royal Oak brought in contract workers, or “strikebreakers.” Violent incidents ensued, including a riot, mine break-ins, and the sabotage of equipment. In September of that same year, an explosion took the lives of nine men working in the mine. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who were already policing the labor disputes, suspected the explosion was intentional and searched for a saboteur as the unforgiving strike continued. Selleck and Thompson, who first wrote about this dispute as journalists for local publications, here deliver a scrupulously researched narrative packed with detail. Concise, journalistic prose effortlessly moves readers through a variety of interviews, from union members and strikebreakers to Royal Oak staff and RCMP officers. The narrative covers the months leading up to the strike and the murders, as well as the long-running stalemate between the company and CASAW, followed by years of fallout. The authors include background on the man who ultimately confessed to the murders and cover the interrogation that led to his confession and his eventual trial. Selleck and Thompson further bolster their account with a bevy of high-quality photos of relevant sites and people and provide a welcome focus on each of the nine victims.
A first-rate, riveting chronicle of a real-life industrial conflict and tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781038306241
Page Count: 462
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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